Gateway Cinephiles

Quick Review: Life During Wartime

2009 (USA)
Director: Todd Solondz
Viewed: August 29, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

Memory, culpability, and above all forgiveness snake with python-scale brazenness through Todd Solondz’ Life During Wartime, a sequel (of sorts) to Happiness, his 1998 pitch-black slice of middle-class disillusionment (and, memorably, pedophilia).  Recasting all of the characters from that film, Solondz revisits the frayed, stymied lives of middle-aged sisters Joy, Trish, and Helen Jordan (here played by Shirley Henderson, Allison Janney, and Ally Sheedy) as they attempt to forget, move on, and start over.  Building upon its predecessor’s single-minded theme—You Hardly Ever Get What You Want—Life During Wartime gazes on the tangled, habitually dysfunctional lives of the Jordan clan and pointedly asks who we should blame for our miseries, and whether our offenders should (or can be) forgiven.  Solondz’s approach is his customary swirl of jarring frankness with comical anguish.  The forthrightness of the film’s aims lend it the aura of a morality play, as does its curious structure, which forgoes conventional narrative for a succession of linked set pieces, each one amusing and aching in its way, and each something of a self-contained short film.  Solondz’ despairing yet earnest sensibility remains an acquired taste.  Yet while Life During Wartime is unmistakably slighter and less bracing than its forebears, it also reveals a more disciplined and adroit filmmaker.

Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Start

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
2010 (USA)
Director: Edgar Wright
Viewed: August 16, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Chase Park Plaza)

There’s no denying that Scott Pilgrim vs. the World seems engineered to tap into the brainstems of Gen-Xers raised on The Legend of Zelda, tickling their nostalgia centers with a blend of hipster banter and sheer awesomeness until they submit, giggling with delight.  More broadly, the film presents a romantic comedy that doesn’t just name-check slacker cultural touchstones such as comics, video games, and indie rock, but earnestly drapes itself in their idioms and aesthetics.  Based on the graphic novels by Bryan Lee O’Malley, and set in a wintery, shabby Toronto of indeterminate era—characters fiddle with their Nintendo DS Lites, but also visit CD stores (how quaint!) and wrestle with AOL dial-up—Scott Pilgrim follows the amorous travails of the titular character, an awkward twenty-two-year-old played by Michael Cera (a bit redundant, I know).   Director Edgar Wright previously showcased his droll wit and rapid-fire stylings in the genre-tweaking, deliriously funny Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, co-written with leading man Simon Pegg.  Here his writing partner is actor Michael Bacall (last seen playing separate characters named Omar in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof and Inglourious Basterds), but Pegg’s absence hasn’t diminished Wright’s facility for maintaining a cutting and relentless comic cadence while slathering on outlandish spectacle.

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Quick Review: Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinksy

2009 (France)
Director: Jan Kounen
Viewed: April 14, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac)

Jan Kounen’s speculative (and frequently downright fictional) film about an affair between two artistic titans sumptuously affirms that not every tale of erotic craving need address romantic love.  Years after witnessing the notorious 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring, Coco Chanel (Anna Mouglalis) invites a hard-luck Igor Stravinksy (Mads Mikkelsen) to her chalet, with his wife and kids in tow.  The designer desires to give the composer the freedom to create, but before you can say “kindred spirits,” the pair are engaged in a sweaty, desperate, but oddly chilly affair.  British writer Chris Greenhalgh adapted his own novel for the film, and both he and Kounen emphasize the white-hot obsessive knots–and inevitable implosion–that can occur when two like-minded souls collide.  Both the Rite, which serves as a recurring musical motif, and the dramatization of Chanel No. 5’s creation underline the film’s fascination with mystery, whether that of the artistic mind itself or the process of inspiration.  These themes prove far more compelling than a flimsy notion of fumbled True Love.  In Kounen’s expressive hands, what might have been a slight (albeit sexy) slice of biopic achieves something finer, a more cerebral cousin to Jane Campion’s poetic ruminations on emotional states.

Quick Review: The Kids Are All Right

2010 (USA)
Director: Lisa Cholodenko
Viewed: August 11, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print

It’s too much to assert that Nic (Annette Benning) and Jules’ (Julianne Moore) lesbianism is incidental to the emotional vigor of The Kids Are All Right, given that sexual and gender anxiety undergird many of the story’s conflicts, not to mention that the plot depends on it.  However, writer-director Cholodenko uses the upheaval generated when Nice and Jules’ teenaged kids seek out their biological father Paul (Mark Ruffalo) for the purposes of highlighting the universal qualities of middle-class, middle-aged families. The message seems to be, contra Anna Karenina (which the film alludes to), unhappy families all share the same gremlins: resentment, frustration, shame, jealousy, and emotional befuddlement.  There’s nothing especially cinematic about Cholodenko’s approach here, aside from one long, devastating close-up of Benning during a moment of traumatic revelation.  Fortunately, the nuanced performances carry the film, elevating dialogue that sometime strays into clumsy satire.  It is Cholodenko’s talent for finding the wry humor in the strangest places that is most endearing, particularly when it comes to human sexuality, which the film acknowledges is rarely explicable or neat.  It’s enough to make one forgive the faintly schematic character to the film’s narrative arc, or its mean-spirited racial digs and hippie-bashing.

Dream a Little Dream a Little Dream a Little Dream

Inception
2010 (USA)
Director: Christopher Nolan
Viewed: July 22, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

“Ambitious” is a term frequently affixed to films solely due to the scale or complexity of their production, whether the work in question is one of the opulent, magisterial epics of old or a contemporary blockbuster that recruits battalions of computer wizards for its virtual world-building.  One could say that Christopher Nolan’s Batman films warrant the label, if only because of their fulsome design and dizzying scope.  However, Nolan’s taste for the ambitious is focused foremost on narrative, as epitomized in the disorienting, reversed chronology of his breakout art-house noir, Memento.  Two years after The Dark Knight trampled everything in its path, that film’s sprawling, relentless, and often preposterous plot nonetheless endures as a grueling feat of sustained anxiety and twenty-first century terror.  Now we come to Inception, the first feature written solely by Nolan since his 1998 debut Following, and it is, if anything, a doubling down on the director’s fascination with convoluted storytelling.  Who else but Nolan could weave a tale that unfolds simultaneously in four linked dream worlds, where time dilates to varying degrees but always ticks inexorably forward?  Who else would have the heedless ambition to even attempt such a thing, to convey such an elaborate scenario through the language of film? Who else but Christopher Nolan would even want to try?

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What’s It Like to Be the Bad Man?

The Killer Inside Me
2010 (USA)
Director: Michael Winterbottom
Viewed: July 12, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac)

Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation of Jim Thompson’s 1952 noir novel The Killer Inside Me is not an enjoyable film, at least as one usually applies the term to a movie-going experience.  Nor is it without vexing structural flaws.  And yet it is an undeniably fascinating work, an absorbing and unnervingly insistent portrayal of a murderous mind that joins the ranks of cult notables such as Mary Harron’s American Psycho and John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.   However, the gaze of Winterbottom’s film reaches back to a more distant point.  Specifically, to Psycho, whose particular cinematic genius the film cannibalizes and assimilates into its own strange approach.  Working from a screenplay by director John Curran, Winterbottom maintains a literate awareness of Hitchcock’s seminal thriller throughout his film, without resorting to shameless appropriation or self-conscious homage.  Thompson’s novel has made the jump to the screen before, in a 1976 Stacy Keach vehicle directed by Burt Kennedy.  However, the new film does not carry the telltale odor of a flimsy remake, nor that of an adaptation overly beholden to its source material.  This new take on The Killer Inside Me is insolent and distinctly cinematic.  It ambles along a lurid, eccentric path on an unsettling mission: to convey both the hideous normalcy and incomprehensible disconnection of the psychopathic mind.

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Late to the Game: Sherlock Holmes

2009 (USA)
Director: Guy Ritchie
Viewed: July 11, 2010
Format: Blu-ray - Warner Brothers (2010)

Guy Ritchie purges the Victorian starch (and elegance) from Doyle’s sleuth, while preserving Holmes’ spooky powers of deduction and highlighting forgotten character details, such as the Great Detective’s talent for bare-knuckle boxing and his penchant for narcotics.  Purists will doubtlessly blanch at the director’s approach, which paints Holmes as a superhero for a steampunk-tinged nineteenth century London.  However, Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal possesses sufficient odd-duck touches to render this Sherlock a credible (if multiplex-friendly) variation on the iconic character.  Witty and rollicking, the film focuses on a Holmesian mainstay—banal evil dressed up in mystical garb—and generally succeeds, despite a story stuffed with baffling plot holes. The gaggle of writers (surprise!) are too eager to sacrifice consistency for the sake of action, and leave far too much unexplained, despite a coda where Holmes sweeps away a plethora of seemingly supernatural events with his vaunted reason.  Still, there’s plenty of glint to admire on this bauble, whether in Ritchie’s flamboyant style, Hans Zimmer’s lively score (his most flat-out stimulating in years), or the consistently rich art direction, which relies heavily on conspicuous computer effects, but still manages to delight.  Sherlock Holmes suggests that anachronistic Victorian adventure can be guilty good fun, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen be damned.

Quick Review: Winter’s Bone

2010 (USA)
Director: Debra Granik
Viewed: June 28, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac)

The chilly Ozark landscape of Winter’s Bone is a skuzzy nightmare version of backwoods Middle America, where every family is linked through tangled blood relations and everyone cooks crystal meth.  This city boy can’t attest to the authenticity of the rural Missouri portrayed in Debra Granik’s film, but the tone of her direction is such that realism takes a back seat to the mythic resonance of seventeen-year-old Ree’s (Jennifer Lawrence) journey.  The film’s depiction of Ree’s materially urgent yet emotionally ambivalent search for her bail-bond-skipping father owes much to noir conventions and the chthonic forays of Greek legend.  In this tale, however, the Hero wanders in despairing circles, and her dragons are an empty fridge, a corrupt sheriff, and rotten-toothed relations who value secrecy more than kinship.  Lawrence shines, and the estimable John Hawkes’ turn as Ree’s reckless uncle provides jolts of wiry menace and righteous wrath.  The script is both frank and admirably subtle, and Granick’s bracingly confident hand relies on expressive touches that lend this regional melodrama the feel of real cinema.  Certainly, the ending is garish and absurdly tidy, but there is also unease there, as well as a quiet lamentation for a fallen world.

This Is the End, Beautiful Friend

Toy Story 3
2010 (USA)
Director: Lee Unkrich
Viewed: June 21, 2010
Format: 3D Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli)

I’ve previously observed that the most gleefully gratifying aspect of Pixar’s triumph over the realms of American feature animation has been the burgeoning thematic sophistication of its films, which have evolved from wholesome entertainments into nimble and sensitive works of art.  However, I’ve also long held the perhaps heretical view among Pixar aficionados that Toy Story and Toy Story 2, despite their charming qualities and seminal status in animated cinema, seem, shall we say, slighter than the later-model Pixar efforts.  The first two chapters in the saga of Woody and Buzz Lightyear are unambiguously lesser films when held alongside subsequent films.  Little in the first two Toy Story films compares to Ratatouille’s virtuoso storytelling, WALL•E’s sweeping sci-fi explorations, or Up’s adroit blending of giddy thrills and profound sorrow. For this reason, there is a rich sense of fulfillment to be had in Toy Story 3, quite apart from its inherent sensory and emotional pleasures.  Director Lee Unkrich—here taking solo helming duties for the first time—expands the scope of the studio’s most familiar franchise to encompass delicate matters such as emotional abuse, the sting of betrayal, class-based tyranny, and the specter of mortality.  Yet Toy Story 3 never loses sight of the fundamental appeal of pint-sized adventure in the perilous wilderness of suburbia, nor of the essential pathos of growing up, here handled (as always) with the utmost care.  The third chapter in the Disney / Pixar behemoth reveals itself to be the best: gorgeous, intricate, a little frightening, and shamelessly touching.

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Quick Review: Sweetgrass

USA (2009)
Directors: Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor
Viewed: June 18, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Webster University Moore Auditorium)

[Sweetgrass is being featured in a limited engagement from June 18-24, 2010 at the Webster University Film Series.]

Raw and curiously engrossing, Sweetgrass is unwavering in its sparing, hard-edged appraisal of a vanishing way of life.  While Barbash and Castaing-Taylor are palpably fascinated by the Allestad sheep ranch, where men on horseback still graze their herds in the high country of Montana, the film aims for something far more lyrical than a mere anthropological treatise on the West.  Spiritually urgent and yet possessing a bittersweet lassitude, Sweetgrass bears witness to uncommonly cruel pastoral patterns that once characterized America’s proud self-conception, but are now forgotten, withered, and nearly vanished.  Nocturnal visits from hungry grizzlies and other daunting challenges lend the story a dose of drama, but the film-makers are more assured when they are simply observing the sensory character of herding life with reverent diligence.  The enduring sights and sounds are sustained, pensive, and faintly abstract, whether the dirty-white blur of hundreds of sheep picking their way through a stream, or the uncanny hush of men who are comfortable sitting in silence.  Sweetgrass might be an essentially American portrait, but the film’s closest kin might be Yung Chang’s Up the Yangtze, as both share a quiet attentiveness borne of equal parts absorption and gentle sorrow.